All My Old Photos

Today?  What?  I was here.  I had it in my head to go down town to buy some contact lenses.  I’m down to my last pair.  The closing window of time begins to ratchet the pressure up and up.  One begins to regularly imagine how glaringly shitty life is with no replacement contacts at hand, when you’re on the first day and then the second without any fresh disposable contacts to peel the lid off of.  A plan will be required.

To the best of my knowledge the closest place to get a pair is about a forty- minute drive from here.  And I told myself I’d head over there in the afternoon.  I told everyone else the same thing.  “I wont be here when you get back.  I’ll be downtown.  Yes.  Getting contacts.  I need them.”  I even put a fake “event” in my calendar to remind me.  It went off.  I ignored it and reckoned I’d head out later.  There was the noon call.  No I hadn’t seen the invite for the 1:00PM call.  Somewhere around 3:00PM I did a quick sanity search and found another two unused lenses in my backpack. 

My older one was home by 4:00PM.  “Hey, you’re back.”  “Yeah, I thought you said you’d be down town?” “Tomorrow. I’ll need to make it happen tomorrow.”  A colleague had invited me out for drinks tomorrow night.  I could match the lenses journey with the box-tick visit to his hotel.  I should probably write my hairdresser who is down in the same neighborhood.

I’m mesmerized by my iPhoto screen saver.  There must be ten thousand photos recycling over and over. (there are in fact 73,015)  Just now something came up from the Venice trip of last week.  Now I’m in Vienna from five years ago.  Other photos reappear regularly, tapped disproportionately by the algorithmic logic’s whim.  Others are arresting because I haven’t seen anything like that for as long as I can remember.  I’d like to pay someone to unpack all the boxes of photos I have at home and scan them, one by one, so I can have them all up here with these forming one big Prustian whirlpool of my photographed narrative. 

Thursday 3/30/17